Murry’s original sin is “The Bell Curve,” a book Murray co-authored more than two decades ago postulating a correlation between poverty and IQ. But it never advocated “eugenics.” Nor is he anti-gay: He’s argued in favor of gay marriage to Republican groups.

The “white supremacist” stuff is especially offensive: Murray, whose first wife was Asian, has mixed-race children.

No matter. The professors who admitted to Professor Stanger that they’d never read a word Murray had written led their students in the chants that drowned out whatever he planned to say at Middlebury.

While the anti-intellectual nature of this juvenile stunt is appalling, what’s worse is that college professors and students at an elite, expensive American college would outsource their thinking to an outfit like the SPLC. One of the professors’ talking points was that his “Bell Curve” research hadn’t been “peer reviewed.” That’s comical when one considers the shoddy nature of the SPLC’s dossiers. As liberal writer Ken Silverstein has noted, “the Law Center is essentially a fraud.”

The most scathing assessments of Dees and his group have always come from the left. Stephen B. Bright, a Yale law professor and president of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights, calls Dees a “shyster” and a “con man.” Bright’s primary complaint is that Dees does precious little litigation on behalf of poor people with the amount of money it pulls in.